Strikes Again!

Recent Entries

First off, Happy Birthday fealubryne! You're a quarter of an century now! I might be old, but so are you, so there!

Raiding was absolutely horrible this week. Had major attendance problems, many dc's, flaky pugs, the works. Last week, we went 7/8 in DS. This week, we couldn't even manage to get Zon'ozz down. It was pathetic. When people once again didn't show up tonight, it was something of a relief, because I really didn't want to go again this week after what the past couple of days have been like.

So I finished cleaning up my DA inbox, finally figured out what exactly I was going to do with the pony I started a couple of weeks ago, and then worked on her. She's now done except for rehairing. Unfortunately, I cannot find my good nylon hair. This is extremely puzzling. I have a drawer for hair. That drawer is full of kanekalon, saran, a lesser quality nylon, even countless saved pony tails (hmm, need to see if I can get someone to take those off my hands, some people like using them but I do not), but none of my good nylon. I spent a good half an hour tearing around the house. I found all sorts of thing, including ponies in progress that I now have no clue at all what they were or who they might have been for (I sure hope I refunded everyone, but I would think there'd have been pitchforks and torches and hunting me down wherever I went on the web if I hadn't), but no hair. Sigh. I wanted a rehairing tool from the site I buy it from anyway, but I seriously had a ton of that stuff, and it's not exactly cheap. Hopefully it'll show up since I bought a bunch more.

The sucky thing about a new mobo is that Windows now doesn't recognize that this is my computer and is bugging me to activate and threatening me if I don't. So I'm going to have to freaking call Microsoft and get a new key. Such a pain. I love Windows 7 in general, but the activation crap involved with it is horrible.

Last night the kids just would not go to sleep, so I put Bea in my room to sleep. Or rather, I tried. I kept hearing more noises and every time I went out of the office, she'd snuck out of my room and was in the hall hanging out at their door. When she'd see me, she'd cry about wanting to sleep in her bed, but of course it's not like she'd been sleeping in the first place, which was the whole problem. Finally, things were quiet, and I went to peek in the hallway. She was still there, asleep by the door...with one of her blankets and a little stuffed animal pillow that Enoch had shoved through the cat door for her. He was just inside their room, where he'd dragged blankets of his own so he could sleep by her. So very sweet. So very obnoxious trying to get them to go to sleep, but so very sweet that they love each other so much.

msking came by during the holidays and helped me get the front room in better shape so that I can start customizing again. I have started on a new pony, haven't done a lot, but it's more than I've done in what turns out to be literally years. I'm shocked to see how long it's been since I've worked on things. I logged into my deviantart account and...wow. Thousands of various notifications that I need to sort through.

It's interesting to see that Bowie remains my most popular pony. I'm genuinely baffled by his ongoing popularity. Whereas a number of my ponies continue to get favorites and comments here and there, he gets dozens and you can't even see most of his face painting on the single picture that's on DA. He's not especially complex or well done or anything, but people are crazy for him. I wish I could figure out what the appeal was so I could do other stuff that would tap into it.

I also need to dig up pictures of the customs I finished up right before the RI convention. Looks like I never posted them anywhere. Now just to figure out where they ended up. I really hope I do have the files somewhere. I'm sure msking could take pictures of Dragon Dreams again if need be, since she snapped her up before anyone could even see her, but I honestly can't remember if there were others that got bought. Looking through what I've done, there are ponies I'd completely forgotten that I'd made (seriously, I forgot about Illyria of all things. Wonder where she is...), so it's certainly not out of the question.

I do wish I could figure out what actually appealed to people, because even if I start doing this a bunch again, I'm not going to be able to take commissions. I think I'm doing a bit better lately, but my energy levels crash extremely easily. People were generally nice and patient waiting for me in the past, but I can't justify letting stuff go on like that again, especially since I have the constant drain of getting Enoch from school, which is only going to get worse in the fall if he gets into the school we want.

Ah well. At any rate, I'll try to do it so that I'm doing something other than just sitting around reading and playing video games. If I can manage to find other homes for some of my work, I'll just have to view it as a bonus.

This entry should have my custom pony icon, but my paid account expired and with the stuff LJ has been doing, I'm not giving them more money. I've actually mirrored my account at Dreamwidth. I don't know if I'll actually move there or not (and if I do, I will continue to monitor my friends page here as well as cross post, because after ten years, I can't exactly leave without severing ties I don't want to sever), but it's there. If anyone else has an account there, feel free to friend me!

I love WoW. Really, I do. But the people? One of my guildies today stated, "A person is smart. People are stupid," and boy, there are way too many people in the WoW populace that fit that. I just got to encounter some of the dregs.

So last week, a new patch came out with some new dungeons. Super freaking easy short dungeons. Dungeons that take like 15-20 minutes to complete start to finish. I've gone from not even getting my main character capped out on valor points for the week to getting multiple characters valor capped within days just because it takes so little time or effort. The last set of heroic dungeons are harder with the gear we have today than these new ones are. Despite that, the WoW community continues to prove me wrong every time I think I've seen the very worst it can provide. I might really have hit the bottom here, though, because I don't see how this fail can ever be topped.

I swapped to my bear to tank to get a Call to Arms satchel. Well of Eternity pops up. Healer notes he's not been in there before and we get going with me sprinkling in explanations here and there. It seems like things are taking a while to go down, but my time sense is screwy at the best of times and I'm not normally looking at it from a tanking perspective, so I attributed it to just doing something different. Then we get to the first boss. We down him slowly. I don't remember what the dps was, but I was the top, and with an arcane mage in the group and the buffs given, I do remember thinking, "WTF?" Still, we move on.

We get to the second "boss," more explanations, and then we start the fight. It goes on. And on. And on. I'm tanking as best I can while staying out of crap, interrupting Azshara's mind control, and so on, when I realize...there are a lot of mages up. Not just alive, but active. Even as I make this realization, the last one goes active and I have four of them on me at once. If you had asked me before today, I would have sworn up and down that a mechanic of the fight is that only two of the mages are active at a time, with more activating as you kill them. Nope, it's time based apparently. Everyone's health is dropping dangerously low from multiple mages doing their massive aoe and the healer goes down. I knew there wasn't much hope, but I attempt to brez and we all die in the process. Now I look at the dps. Arcane mage 6k. Elemental shaman 6k. The third dps, a warrior, was no treasure at 9k, but I still felt trepidation when he fled without a word.

We get a replacement in, a frost DK, and start up again. I had already asked the dps to step it up, but I tried to do my max dps possible, even going after some of the hands. Wasn't enough. We ended up with four mages active at the same time again. Everyone but me and the DK go down and with popping a bunch of cooldowns, including a healing potion and my herbalism heal, we somehow manage to pull it off. Still, when I look, the mage and shaman were still both doing in the 6-7k range. I judge the shaman is slightly worse and initiate a vote to kick, but the mage is the shaman's guildie and the DK refuses to kick. "It's easy to only do 6k dps when you're dead," he says in party chat. I noted the reason they had died was because their dps was so low and we had in fact wiped to the fight previously due to it. He brushed me off, though, and we continued.

I figured there was only one boss left and it's virtually impossible to wipe on him, so decided to stick it out through one attempt. Hahahahahahahahaha. Very, very funny. The healer had shown a tendency to stand in crap through the whole instance and he went down pretty fast to Fel Fire. I manage to brez him without dying and we kept going. Tyrande eventually became overwhelmed, but despite my explanation before the fight and yelling in party chat during it, no one went after the debilitators. The healer stood in fire again and died and so did the mage and shaman right as I was downing the second debilitator and bringing Tyrande back into play. Varo'than was almost dead as well and the DK and I were able to down him. I told the dead to run back in and went and started hitting on Mannoroth. The DK ended up dying somehow and ran back in as well, but I was there by my lonesome for a long, long time.

Finally they got back. Mannoroth was still at 90-something million health. And it continued to barely budge even with them there. A second set of debilitators spawned, another time-based surprise. I went to kill them, yelling at the dps to help, but instead of doing so, everyone died again. I honestly have no idea how I survived. Either I built up some sort of huge savage defense shield that combined with leader of the pack procs to keep me up or I was bugged, but my health was hardly budging anymore than Mannoroth's was. Eventually the idiots all trundled their way back in. During all of this, the DK started noting in party chat that the dps was stupidly low and that I had in fact been right. Honestly, if I hadn't seen the spells flying from the mage and shaman, I'd have thought they weren't doing anything. Rather than just worrying about gathering up the adds, which is what the tank is supposed to be doing on the fight, I told them to stack on me and I went and sat by Mannoroth so that I could get some dps in on him. All but the DK ignored me. So whatever, I let Tyrande kill whatever attacked them and just took out what ran towards me and hit on Mannoroth.

I thought we were saved when Illidan transformed us. Surely it can't take that long once we get there? Oh yes. Yes it can. The fight still dragged. And dragged. And dragged. The mage finally hits hero. The DK somehow manages to die again, but hey, my battlerez was back, so I just brought him back up myself. I don't know how, but we finally got to 26 million or so and Mannoroth did his thing and the encounter ended.

How long did it take? My recount states the fight went from 05:37:13 to 06:01:08. Twenty-four freaking minutes. I could have done almost two other instances in the time it took to kill the boss. The Lick King would have enraged. Civilizations collapsed and stars went nova during that time. It's entirely possible that I'm going to wake up tomorrow to find that my kids have grown up and moved out in the time it took to finish the damn fight.

I daresay that I'm automatically going to win all pissing and moaning contests about who's been in the worst group ever from now on.

I'm not sure if I can speak of such a tragedy. The trauma might be eternal and require years of therapy in order to resume a somewhat normal life. I just made bacon and Eric...he...he stole a piece of it.

I'm not sure if there's much future left in this relationship. Anyone know a lawyer?

I had forgotten Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume had even existed, but a couple months back I was getting tired of Pokemon B/W and glanced at my shelf of DS games and facepalmed. Oh yeah, not only does it exist, but Eric got it for me for either my birthday or Christmas last year. So I picked it up with vague memories of there being some negativity around the game and popped it in with low expectations.Low expectations or not, the game blew me away.

It does differ from the other two VP games in two major ways. The first and biggest is that the sequences in between fights are no longer a platformer. Instead, it turned into a 3/4 view turn-based strategy RPG. That means the puzzle elements are gone, but it does have some real strategy involved. The closet equivalent I can come up with is Disgaea because if you situate your characters appropriately, they'll help each other out with attacking even if they've already had their turn. It's not the most robust system, but it serves its purpose, which is setting up awesome combos with the series' unique battle system. Once you engage in combat, the battles are almost identical to those in Lennath, with the SRPG elements on the map replacing the strategic movement of the characters added in Silmaria. The only real difference from Lennath is that you're taking on monsters one at a time and the only altitude issues happen if you've knocked your target into the air while you're trying to use a low thrusting move at the same time. No more harpies that can only be hit by archers or mages. The enemies still counter attack, but as their positioning relative to the enemy is exactly like that on the map, there isn't the back row protection of Lennath either. If a character is within range of that enemy's attack grid, they are fair game, though the AI seems to favor attacking the character who initiated the battle.

The other big difference is more of a story based element. Rather than working with the valkyries in one way or another, the main character is an embittered young man who hates the Battle Maiden and wants to kill her due to her supposed role in his father's death. Somewhere along the way he took the phrase "Chooser of the Slain" to mean that the valkyrie actually picks who is going to die rather than just picking those worthy of being einherjar from among those who died anyway. It's especially ironic that he and his compatriots refer to her (Lennath in this case, though he never knows that) as the Death Goddess several times...despite the fact that the covenant named in the title is one he makes with Hel. You know, the /actual/ Norse death goddess.

It's a stand alone title with only a few minor hooks seen that connect it to the other games. Those hooks do serve to show that it takes place between Silmaria (crazy time travel aside) and Lennath and help set up some of the chaos going on during Lennath. Interesting for a series fan like myself, but not anything to make a newcomer feel confused or like they're missing out. What really struck me is the beautiful language used. I've been trying to think of a good way to describe the dialogue for days now, and the best I can come up with is that it's like every character has a speechwriter at their side so as to always sound like a robust hero of legend. It's not at all how people really talk, but then, neither do people go around trying to chase down a valkyrie in order to kill her in real life. It's fancy, rather formal, and graceful. I certainly can't comment on how close the translation is (I suspect not at all in anything but general tone), but whoever did it is an amazing writer. Games have sure come a long way from where they used to be, where we would get barely coherent garbage, not to name names. *coughFFVIIcough* I've played virtually no console games since shortly before Enoch was born (I just barely failed to complete Silmaria for the first time then), so I genuinely can't recall what the dialogue was like in the other two games, but I was very impressed by this one.

As has become traditional for VP, there are three real endings (generally referred to as A for the best, C for the worst). Once you finish and then cry as you have to sit through the credits (Every. Single. Time.) you get an option to save again and can start back at the first with all items, techniques, and tactics intact. Companions must be found again, spells relearned, and levels regained. If anything, this one feels like it's meant for all three endings to be seen to consist of one game. I did all three in around 32 hours, the second and third playthroughs going a bit faster due to the stuff that carries over. Starting at the C ending, then doing B, and finishing up with A is best from both a story progression viewpoint as well as difficulty. It would be incredibly difficult to do the last two scenarios with only the gear you've gathered from your first playthrough, aside from the huge emotional payoff you'd miss. The development of the main character, Wyl, and the way his life ends up after "learning" to make the right choices through the three stories was just perfect. I actually teared up a little and I don't remember the last time I've done that for a game.

There's lots more I could discuss with gameplay and such, but as I've already babbled for ages about a game from an obscure series that came out something like two or three years ago, I'll stop now. It's an awesome game if you like RPGs that aren't just Oblivion or Final Fantasy repackaged for the umpteenth time. For all that JRPGs have been getting a lot of crap for being stale lately, Tri-Ace still seems to be doing a stellar job in my opinion. Five stars, two thumbs up, whatever ratings you want to use, I loved it.

ETA: Just went to put this on Amazon too, and it's only $10 now. If the VP games are your cup of tea and you don't have it yet, it's a good time to grab it!

I went to get Bea up from her nap in order to get Enoch from preschool. She was awake when I went into her room, playing with some stuffed animals that have lately been her preferred toys. When I told her it was time to get up so we could get Enoch, she said, "No, I'm busy." Funny kid.

I ordered an Epicus Maximus mousepad from BlizzCon, because really. It's Epicus Maximus! He's been my wallpaper on my desktop since he was put in the Cata beta last year, though it's probably getting to be time to do something new. It arrived today. This thing is a freaking placemat. It's huge! It's twice as tall as my old mousepad and half again as large. The standard size mousepad I've been using is one I had custom made that has Zeus, my devilsaur, on it, but the surface is funky enough that I'm not sure it's really that good and my kids have been trying to peel it off the cushioned back since I got it, which was the other reason I got the new mousepad. Figured I could have a better surface that wasn't going to get peeled away. Now...I'm not so sure. I'll try it out (though I think it's going to have to wait until it airs out, the smell is making me sick), but I'm not sure that a mousepad half the size of my desk is really going to work for me. o.0 It is pretty epic, though, I can't deny that.

Ah hah! Hilarious things Enoch said tonight that I remembered long enough to write down!

At my mom's house, she and Enoch were talking about cats.

G(randma): How many cats do you have?E: Salem and Freya and Lottie.G: And how many is that?E: Enough.

At our church, there's a children's program called Primary. They put together stuff for the kids to do in our main meeting once or twice a year to show off for the parents and give some beginning experience with public speaking. Enoch's been given a line to say, so we've been asking him what it is here and there to help him remember it. I asked him to tell my mom the line right before we left.

E: Heavenly Father has a plan for me.G: Heavenly Father has a plan for you?E: Yeah, it's in the diaper bag.

In my wanderings online yesterday, I came across a recent article on the BBC about the abuse that some chronic fatigue syndrome/ME researchers face in the UK. One in particular noted getting everything up to death threats and having to have his mail scanned for suspicious devices. The reporter was all aghast, wondering how it is that he could keep working under such conditions where the patients don't seem to want to get help, with him giving a "you do what you have to do" sort of answer.

While I too was surprised that people would have such a reaction to a researcher into such a debilitating condition(s), I wondered if there was more to the story. So I Googled his name, Simon Wessely, and let me tell you, if I was in the UK, I'd sure wish him dead even though I'm not the type to send death threats, seeing how I don't want to go to jail or anything. This man has spent nearly a quarter of a century denying the thousands of papers that exist documenting physical abnormalities in CFS patients and instead trying to get it classified as a psychiatric disorder. He, of course, is a psychiatrist. He has even gotten children removed from their homes when parents have sought to get medical treatment for this "psychiatric" disorder. He's not just some lunatic fringe lone wolf, though. He's a major researcher at King's College and has numerous colleagues putting forth the same views as him. This group also has various ties to corporate interests who would fare better if CFS was considered a psychiatric disorder because of the reduced benefits granted in the UK for those sorts of thing.

The reading I've been doing on this guy is simply chilling and is a good example of what much of my previous opposition to a national healthcare system stemmed from. When a real, physical disorder gets classified as a mental illness in a system that is administered nationwide under the same standards...what's a person to do? I get someone like that, which the first pain specialist at the clinic I go to definitely was, I can keep looking until I find someone more sympathetic. But when the system is set up so that everyone, everywhere with a certain illness has to legally be treated that way? Bad, bad, bad. There is so much else that is also bad with our current system in the US, I have to reluctantly support the establishment of a properly run system (which in my opinion Obamacare doesn't qualify as), but the current situation in the UK due to these clowns is a realization of my fears.

Interestingly enough, reading up on this guy's treatments makes me feel like I dodged a bullet. I'm fairly certain that oh-so-vague psychologist I saw in February was trying to push a similar Cognitive Behavior Therapy/Graded Exercise Therapy treatment program on me. I might not be making any progress with the PA I'm seeing, but I'd prefer to make no progress with someone who wants to try things without promising a miracle cure over those promising a miracle cure who blame me for my problems or think I'm mental when the "miracle" doesn't work.

I don't remember where I got this link, but this should be required watching for everyone. It's long, but well-worth the time and talks about the evils of sugars, mainly fructose and its derivatives such as the ubiquitous high fructose corn syrup. The professor hits on one of my pet peeves of kids drinking things like juice constantly under the guise that it's healthy, but goes into how bad it is at a depth even I didn't guess.

Today is Enoch's first day of preschool. He's been alternately excited and contrarily refusing to go. We had a short meeting with his teacher last Friday, where Bea showed herself to be far more ready for school than he actually is, chatting and being social while Enoch hid his face in Eric's shoulder. Of course he warmed up enough to draw a picture for the classroom right as the family after us came in for their time. Children!

It was apparently worth it, though, because while he hung back a bit, when we asked him to give his bag of extra clothes to his teacher, he did so without a fuss, and even /looked/ at her. Amazing! Then he was off, wanting to go slide outside with the other kids. We barely got him to say goodbye to us, which I'm hoping isn't going to cause him to throw a fit later when he realizes we're not there anymore.

And...of course we managed to be late. Me by myself? I'm on time to things. Eric by himself? He's on time to many/most things. Add us together? Somehow we end up late to every freaking thing ever. Something always happens, whether it's being distracted by things on the computer or trying to find shoes or organize some of the havoc the whirlwinds that our children create in our home. Then the traffic was bad. How traffic manages to be bad in the half mile or so that we had to go, I don't know, but it was. And parking? Forget about it. So I feel like a complete and utter heel, taking my oldest kid late to his first day of school ever. Oy.

I'd post pictures, but if I waited to do that, the post would never happen at all. Perhaps Eric will go to the actual effort, though the pictures are awful with the harsh, bright, afternoon sunlight pouring down on him.

It's a good thing Eric was at the store. A little bit ago, I went to get Bea up from her nap. She had a diaper cover on with crappy velcro, so had one of the fancy diaper covers from a dress over the plain functional one to help keep it together. In between those two covers? A big old spider. Very startling, to say the least. I mean, how the heck does a spider go up her pants and then under some fairly form-fitting elastic to get up there? Especially since this was a fairly large specimen.

My protective inclinations warred with each other for a moment, long enough for rationality to resume, and I used her pants to scoop up the spider to protect both it and me and took it outside. It was really quite gorgeous, a deep red cephalothorax with a cream abdomen. After looking at it for a minute, I let it go and went back in to change her diaper and then identify it.

Turns out it's a pillbug/woodlouse/etc spider, Dysdera crocata (named for what it eats), and it's one of the most commonly found inside spiders in Utah. Odd, because I don't recall seeing one in the house before. The pictures I'm looking at have quite a wide range of colors on the cephalothorax, from brown to red, so maybe I'm just not remembering a more plain brown one. I'm assuming I've seen them outside at some point, though.

Here is the best resemblance to it that I've found. It was a much deeper red, though. Very pretty, as I said, and fortunately harmless. Still, if Bea develops any super powers in the near future, I guess I better look for a spider bite in her nether regions...

Enoch has just been walking his hand around the room as a "spider" and babbling happily about the spider going to go help his friend spiders. Now he's added Thomas and Duck to the game with the spider helping them get up and down the stairs he built out of blocks. Freaking adorable.

I have to admit I'm rather tickled that rather than pretending to be a pirate or a doctor or whatever, he pretends to be a spider.

I'm cleaning off my desk and among the things sitting around on my shelves is an old photo album that Enoch partially tore apart. It's not like I have any desperate need to look at photos from my childhood and teen years all the time, so I figured I would just pull the pictures out and stick them in a box to take up less space. As I'm doing so, Enoch suddenly points at one of the pictures and says, "Jesus!"

The picture was me as a little girl holding my cat, Buzzy. Bet you didn't know I was the second coming of Christ, huh, 'cause I sure didn't!

I got Ogre Battle 64 on my Wii recently and I've been playing it quite a bit this week. I'd already nodded off once while playing it tonight, so I went back to playing it and transferred myself to bed when I thought I was sleepy enough to drop off for good. As I was laying there waiting for sleep to take me, I was thinking about the game, which understandably led to thoughts of Enix and Squaresoft (Enix was the original publisher of the series, Squaresoft got the rights later on as well as most of the devs, leading to Final Fantasy Tactics), which led to feelings of rage and hurt and disappointment that were very much not conducive to sleep.

Why the rage? Because of the lack of Dragon Quest VI. Some years back, the entire second trilogy of IV-VI were retooled for the DS and rereleased in Japan for the upteenth time. The U.S., on the other hand, had never seen V or VI except through fan translated ROMs. When it was announced that there were plans for all three remakes to be brought over here, there was much rejoicing in the Dragon Quest community. This was around the time that Square Enix shut down Slime Knights, their official DQ fansite, though, and I never really got into any of the fan run communities. I just waited and watched and bought IV and V when they were released. And then waited. And waited. And waited some more. And nothing. All three games were released over the course of about a year in Japan. But nothing, not a word about DQ VI here. They never even bothered to finish the freaking website they set up for the three games.

So I came prepared to rant about that. I went to my friend Google just to confirm when the last time we heard any word about the game was to make my bitching about the stealth cancellation more accurate only to find...A MIRACLE! Last month, a "mere" two years after the release of DQV here, they released DQVI! I'm almost more shocked than thrilled, to be honest, after all the crap that's gone on with the series in this country. But holy crap, I finally get to play it! And legally! Without having to mess with ROMs and different translation files and all that nonsense!

I was going to talk about the bizarre timing, but after a bit of digging, it appears it might not actually be SE America's fault. The DS versions of IV and V were released in November 2007 and July 2008 in Japan respectively, but VI didn't get out there until January 2010. So the massive delay appears to be Japan's fault, because how could they give us information on a release here when it wasn't even out there yet? Very strange. One wouldn't think that DQIX would have anything to do with it, you'd think they'd have different teams, but why such a huge delay, especially for a game guaranteed to be a best seller in Japan? Ah well. I guess it doesn't matter because I'm finally really getting it!

The kids did something to my Kindle tonight, and now, alas, it has passed into the great electric heaven. Judging by the pattern of lines in the e-ink, my current hypothesis was that the cause was getting smashed by my water bottle in the fall when they knocked both off the shelf rather than the fall itself (as the Kindle has survived falls quite well previously, both with and without the cover). The main point of this post is not the death of the poor thing, however, but Amazon's fantastic customer service.

I had gotten the extended warranty for just such an occasion, so I dug up the paper from it and called the number about 10:00 pm tonight, right after I discovered the malfunction. I didn't actually expect to get an answer, but I did. The nice lady looked me up and said I was still within the original warranty. I said that it broke in a fall, so wasn't that an extended warranty thing? She said I was still in the original warranty and she'd transfer me to Amazon as it was up to them.

The nice Amazon lady asked what happened, confirmed my address, and said I'd get the new Kindle on Tuesday with a return label for the old one. The warranty info talks about a single replacement, but as the Amazon warranty says "normal wear and tear" rather than accidental stuff, I decided to confirm this and asked if my warranty was now void. She told me she didn't think so, but put me on hold to clarify just in case...and the answer is nope. Even though they're giving me a full replacement, my warranty is still in effect until April 16, 2012 if anything else happens. Amazing. Usually you have to pull teeth to get any warranty work done on things and they tend to try to get you with small print, but Amazon seems to be going way above and beyond. I already adored my Kindle. I'm now over the moon about the whole thing.

The only thing that sucks is that I got mine right before the new generation came out...and I don't like some of the features as much and the dimensions are different so I have to get a new case. Le sigh. Far better issues to have to deal with that not having one at all, that's for sure. I'll survive and the lighter weight will be even better on my hands.

The long and short of it is, though, that if you're in the market for an e-reader, get the Kindle. One of my in-laws got a Sony e-reader due to DRM objections and if something were to happen to that, there is no way Sony would treat them the way Amazon just treated me. Obviously Amazon is like this so they can continue to sell more books, but it's not like Sony treats its game customers like this either, so it still speaks well of them.

I just caught the kids in the kitchen, which is gated off. Enoch knows how to open the gate, and while he's good most of the time, he decided to open it today and Bea followed him. Eric had been out for a bit and came home right after. He asked where Enoch was, and I told him about the time out and why, noting that Bea wasn't in one since she couldn't have done it on her own.

He said, "Yes, you're a follower, aren't you, Bea?" She grinned, so I chimed in and said the same thing.

I seem to recall doing this before, but I keep wanting to write a real post and not getting around to it, so I don't post about the funny little things the kids do, and then I forget. So once again, I'm going to try to do better about posting funny little things for my own memory, even if it's not particularly interesting to the rest of the world.

At any rate, when I went to get Enoch up from his nap today, he pointed at the Care Bears on his bed and told me, "That Oopsy Bear. That Share Bear." This Share Bear happens to be of the new style, with the crossed lollipops for her symbol rather than the shake with two straws she originally had in the 80's. He then points to those lollipops and declares, "That scissors." I had to laugh, because once he said that, I too could see the scissors.

I think this is a pretty good short answer. Look at what we have and are doing to ourselves and our world. People like me are the amphibians of humans, the indicators that something is very, very wrong. Autoimmune illnesses are virtually unheard of in undeveloped and underdeveloped countries, though I'm sure that's going to change as globalization and outsourcing continue to spread.

Both of the kids have been quite slow at starting to say no. Bea has finally started saying it regularly just the past few days. At almost two, she's a bit younger than Enoch was, but has had him modeling it, so not really surprising. It's led to funny stuff, though.

Today, while Eric was getting them ready for their nap, the kids were wanting to turn the lights on. He told them no, we didn't need them because it was daytime and the sun was out. Then he explained that the sun is a star that's close to us rather than really far away. At this, Bea says, "No!" No matter how much Eric tried to explain, she kept declaring no, even sounding a bit offended about it. I'm not sure why the concepts of the sun being a star or stars being really far away are offensive, but hey, who knows what goes on in the mind of toddlers?